Education, need for cognition, and campaign interest as moderators of news effects on political knowledge: An analysis of the knowledge gap

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 910-929

  Liu, Yung I ^a   Eveland Jr , William P ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COGNITION; EDUCATION; MEDIA ROLE; TELEVISION;

EID: 33645816986     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900508200410     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Phillip J. Tichenor, George A. Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien, "Mass Media Flow and Differential Growth in Knowledge," Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (summer 1970): 159-70;
2. Kasisomayajula Viswanath and John R. Finnegan, Jr., "The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis: Twenty-Five Years Later," in Communication Yearbook 19, ed. Brant R. Burleson (CA: Sage, 1996), 187-227.
3. For example, see George A. Donohue, Phillip J. Tichenor, and Clarice N. Olien, "Mass Media and the Knowledge Gap: A Hypothesis Reconsidered," Communication Research 2 (January 1975): 3-23
4. William P, Eveland, Jr. and Dietram A. Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use with Gaps in Knowledge and Participation," Political Communication 17 (July-September 2000): 215-37
5. Thomas M. Holbrook, "Presidential Campaigns and the Knowledge Gap," Political Communication 19 (October 2002): 437-54
6. Michael McDevitt and Steven Chaffee, "Closing Gaps in Political Communication and Knowledge: Effects of a School Intervention," Communication Research 27 (June 2000): 259-92.
7. See Viswanath and Finnegan, "The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis" for a review.
8. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
9. See also Nojin Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis: Education, Motivation, and Media Use," Communication Research 26 (August 1999): 385-413.
10. See also Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis."
11. Others (e.g., Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use") have described their work using the traditional knowledge gap terminology. Statistically speaking, it does not matter which variable is considered the causal agent and which is the moderator; the empirical test of moderation is the same. However, this is conceptually important.
12. For example, see Peter Clarke and Eric Fredin, "Newspapers, Television and Political Reasoning," Public Opinion Quarterly 42 (summer 1978): 143-60
13. John P. Robinson and Mark R. Levy, "News Media Use and the Informed Public: A 1990s Update," Journal of Communication 46 (spring 1996): 129-35.
14. Doris A. Graber, "Why Voters Fail Information Tests: Can the Hurdles Be Overcome?" Political Communication 11 (October/December 1994): 331-46.
15. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
16. Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler, Dean E. Alger, Timothy E. Cook, Montague Kern, and Darrell M. West, Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, And the Media in A Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
17. Steven H. Chaffee and Stacey Frank, "How Americans Get Political Information: Print Versus Broadcast News," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (July 1996): 48-58;
18. Steven H. Chaffee, Xinshu Zhao, and Glenn Leshner, "Political Knowledge and the Campaign Media of 1992," Communication Research 21 (June 1994): 305-24.
19. Doris A. Graber, Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 24.
20. Graber, Processing Politics, 11-42.
21. See Hans-Bernd Brosius, Wolfgang Donsbach, and Monika Birk, "How Do Text-Picture Relations Affect the Informational Effectiveness of Television Newscasts?" Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 40 (spring 1996): 180-95;
22. Stephen D. Reese, "Visual-verbal Redundancy Effects on Television News Learning," Journal of Broadcasting 28 (winter 1984): 79-87.
23. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use";
24. Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis."
25. See Jan Kleinnijenhuis, "Newspaper Complexity and the Knowledge Gap," European Journal of Communication 6 (December 1991): 499-522.
26. Arthur R. Cohen, Ezra Stotland, and Donald M. Wolfe, "An Experimental Investigation of Need for Cognition," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51 (September 1955): 291-94.
27. John T. Cacioppo and Richard E. Petty, "The Need for Cognition," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42 (January 1982): 116-31;
28. John T. Cacioppo, Richard E. Petty, Chuan Feng Kao, and Regina Rodriguez, "Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion: An Individual Difference Perspective," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (November 1986): 1032-43.
29. John T. Cacioppo, Richard E. Petty, and Chuan Feng Kao, "The Efficient Assessment of Need for Cognition," Journal of Personality Assessment 48 (June 1984): 306.
30. John T. Cacioppo, Richard E. Petty, Jeffrey A. Feinstein, and W. Blair G. Jarvis, "Dispositional Differences in Cognitive Motivation: The Life And Times of Individuals Varying in Need For Cognition," Psychological Bulletin 119 (March 1996): 197-253.
31. Also see Maria E. Grabe, Annie Lang, Shuhua Zhou, and Paul D. Bolls, "Cognitive Access to Negatively Arousing News: An Experimental Investigation of the Knowledge Gap," Communication Research 27 (February 2000): 3-26 for an alternative perspective.
32. Fiona Chew and Sushma Palmer, "Interest, the Knowledge Gap, and Television Programming," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 38 (summer 1994): 271-87;
33. B. K. L. Genova and Bradley S. Greenberg, "Interests in News and the Knowledge Gap," Public Opinion Quarterly 43 (spring 1979): 79-91.
34. Genova and Greenberg, "Interests in News."
35. Kevin G. Barnhurst and Diana Mutz, "American Journalism and the Decline in Event-Centered Reporting," Journal of Communication 47 (autumn 1997): 50.
36. Age often is nonlinearly (specifically, in quadratic form) related to political knowledge, such that there is a positive relationship between age and knowledge throughout most of the distribution of age, with a negative relationship occurring only at the highest levels. Thus, in analyses that follow we account for both linear and quadratic relationships between age and knowledge.
37. For example, see Jack M. McLeod, Zhongshi Guo, Katie Daily, Catherine A. Steele, Huiping Huang, Edward Horowitz, and Huailin Chen, "The Impact of Traditional and Nontraditional Media Forms in the 1992 Presidential Election," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (summer 1996): 401-16.
38. We gathered data using the standard 18-item NFC short form (Cacioppo, Petty, and Kao, "The Efficient Assessment of Need for Cognition") ourselves from a convenience sample of college undergraduates to help validate the use of these two items as substitutes for a larger scale. A scale of the two ANES items correlated with the full 18-item short form of which they are part at .64. However, ANES converted one of the two Likert-type items in the short form NFC scale to a dichotomous item.
39. William P. Eveland, Jr., "The Cognitive Mediation Model of Learning from the News: Evidence from Nonelection, Off-Year Election, and Presidential Election Contexts," Communication Research 28 (October 2001): 571-601;
40. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
41. William L. Benoit and Glenn J. Hansen, "Presidential Debate Watching, Issue Knowledge, Character Evaluation, and Vote Choice," Human Communication Research 30 (January 2004): 121-44;
42. Craig L. Brians and Martin P. Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge and Salience: Comparing Reception from TV Commercials, TV News and Newspapers," American Journal of Political Science 40 (February 1996): 172-93.
43. An example from the 2004 election campaign helps further explain why this approach makes sense. George W. Bush publicly claimed to support the renewal of the assault weapons ban, but did not expend any effort to encourage the Republican-controlled Congress to pass the measure so that he could sign it. Thus, while one might argue that Bush favored the assault weapons ban, others might just as reasonably argue that his public support for the measure was simply a political ploy, and that he did not really support it at all. In fact, at least one non-partisan Web site that provided stances on various issues for all of the candidates (the Minnesota NPR site) indicated that Bush was opposed to the weapons ban despite his public statements in favor of it. This illustrates the difficulty of placing candidates on ambiguously labeled issue positions and claiming the placement is accurate or inaccurate in absolute terms. However, it would not be difficult to argue that Kerry was more in favor of this measure than Bush.
44. Vincent Price, "Political information," in Measures of Political Attitudes, ed. John P. Robinson, Phillip R. Shaver, and Lawrence S. Wrightsman (NY: Academic Press, 1999), 591-639.
45. Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien, "Mass Media Flow."
46. See Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use";
47. Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis";
48. Jack M. McLeod, Carl R. Bybee, and Jean A. Durall, "Equivalence of Informed Political Participation: The 1976 Presidential Debates as a Source of Influence," Communication Research 6 (October 1979): 463-87.
49. See William P. Eveland, Jr., "Interactions and Nonlinearity in Mass Communication: Connecting Theory and Methodology," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (summer 1997): 400-16.
50. For a review, see Eveland, "Interactions and Nonlinearity."
51. Robert C. MacCallum and Corinne M. Mar, "Distinguishing Between Moderator and Quadratic Effects in Multiple Regression," Psychological Bulletin 118 (November 1995): 405-21.
52. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use"
53. Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis."
54. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
55. Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis."
56. Genova and Greenberg, "Interests in News."
57. Gary H. McClelland and Charles M. Judd, "Statistical Difficulties of Detecting Interactions and Moderator Effects," Psychological Bulletin 114 (September 1993): 376-90.
58. James Jaccard and Choi K. Wan, "Measurement Error in the Analysis of Interaction Effects Between Continuous Predictors Using Multiple Regression: Multiple Indicator and Structural Equation Approaches," Psychological Bulletin 117 (March 1995): 348-57.
59. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
60. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use."
61. McLeod, Bybee, and Durall, "Equivalence of Informed Political Participation."
62. Eveland and Scheufele, "Connecting News Media Use";
63. Kwak, "Revisiting the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis."
64. William P. Eveland, Jr., Krisztina Marton, and Mihye Seo, "Moving Beyond 'Just the Facts': The Influence of Online News on the Content and Structure of Public Affairs Knowledge," Communication Research 31 (February 2004): 82-108.
65. David H. Jonassen, Katherine Beissner, and Michael Yacci, Structural Knowledge: Techniques for Representing, Conveying, and Acquiring Structural Knowledge (NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), 4.
66. William P. Eveland, Jr., Juliann Cortese, Heesun Park, and Sharon Dunwoody, "How Web Site Organization Influences Free Recall, Factual Knowledge, and Knowledge Structure Density," Human Communication Research 30 (April 2004): 208-33.